Marlowe’s flawed vision has gone to the devil
in Doctor Faustus, at
West Yorkshire Playhouse, says Dominic Cavendish.

The Faustus story – a man sells his soul to the devil to achieve unrivalled power, knowledge and wealth – exerts such a strong hold over our imagination and seems so true to the way insatiable ambition sacrifices our better natures that it’s small wonder how often Christopher Marlowe’s dramatisation (published in 1604) comes round for revival.

In the past few years, it has surfaced at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Manchester Royal Exchange; I’ve also seen it staged in an Oxford bookshop. The difficulty any production faces, though, is how far the director should go to compensate for the work’s deficiencies. Do too little and you can notice that for all its sparkling set-up, gleaming verse and gripping denouement of inescapable damnation, it drags in the middle. Do too much to jazz it up and refashion it for today’s tastes and you can wonder – as one did with Rupert Goold’s dazzlingly flashy, BritArt-inspired rewrite in 2004 – whether the original has been properly served.

At the West Yorkshire Playhouse, now being re-energised by James Brining, we’re presented with an unusual half-way house. Playwright Colin Teevan and director Dominic Hill (who runs the Glasgow Citizens) have retained the essentials of Acts I, II and V but done their own thing with the cumbersome and comic III and IV.

The overarching conceit is that we don’t stray out of modern theatrical confines. Faustus resembles a cross between Harry Potter and David Blaine – feats of magic are his bag and fame is his game. We’re conscious of the tawdry artifice – the company, sitting on the sidelines, clustered round dressing-tables, flit in and out of roles. Yet we’re left dumbfounded by some highly accomplished illusions – drawing us into Faustus’s dangerous desire to experience a world beyond mortal ken.

Kevin Trainor’s nerdish necromancer feasts on adulation and treats backstage crew as playthings although, in one of many gender-bending strokes, it’s his lady assistant Mephistopheles – played with a weird, languid foreign accent by Siobhan Redmond – who calls the shots. The production, overstuffed with ideas to the point of becoming muddled, misses the globe-trotting grandeur of Marlowe’s vision, aside from an entertaining stop-off at the White House where the President gets a mocking, Monroe-esque Happy Birthday. But it catches well the hellish claustrophobia of our restless urges. Flawed, then, but not lacking in style or substance.